While the top industry research firms Gartner, Forrester, and IDC continue to post positive predictions surrounding cloud revenue growth over the next 3 years, certain cloud vendors aren’t currently fairing so well. Heavy-hitters like HP and Cisco, that got their start in hardware, launched and subsequently shut down cloud service offerings over the past few years.

It’s no secret that household names like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google already have a strong foothold in the cloud marketplace, and vendors churning out ill-conceived platforms just to make a quick buck aren’t well received.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) like you have made it clear that there’s no room in the cloud vendor ecosystem for “cutting-edge” cloud solutions that behave like clunky legacy systems. With the wrong tools, delivering a cloud solution can be a never-ending headache:

Migration MigrainesIf systems don’t work as promised, you could end up manually moving data from a legacy system to a cloud solution, which could take months and impact your customer’s ability to be productive.

Integration ChallengesAs a MSP, when you’re offering a ‘cloud solution’, it’s typically made up of several individual products. If those solutions can’t converse with each other, your job will become much more complicated.

Onboarding HurdlesUsability really matters. If the new cloud solution doesn’t offer much in the way of automation/integration and is going to require more clicks or manual data entry to perform the same tasks, it’s a dud.

Lucky for you, the cloud vendor herd seems to be thinning out. Those that deliver poor functionality and user experiences are being jettisoned for more user-friendly solutions that enable MSPs to turn cloud-services revenue into passive income that requires little to no ongoing effort to maintain—or at least that’s the objective.

True cloud solutions should help control costs, not make them balloon. When evaluating cloud solutions to add to your offering, make sure they can deliver the following essential benefits:

Easy MigrationBefore selecting a new cloud vendor, make sure you understand what migrating your customers to their solution will entail. Top-notch vendors will be able to seamlessly move most small and medium clients to the new service in just a few days. Others can take months.

Management & Automation Tools that Work as PromisedSounds like a no-brainer, but testing out a solution’s automation claims prior to implementing it is pretty important. Only through hands-on evaluation can you identify unsavory design flaws that could end up leading to a lot of late nights in the office for your technical services team.

Integration with Complementary SolutionsA feature-rich and easy-to-use product isn’t enough. Many cloud offerings can include more than 5 separate vendors, which means they all need to be able to integrate with common platforms (like your PSA, RMM, or accounting tool) to ensure there aren’t any billing or service delivery hiccups.

Ability to Scale EasilyThe whole point of moving to a public cloud solution is to keep usage bursts from inhibiting performance. Make sure that scalability is there and works the way you need it to.

Double-Digit Profit MarginsWith so much competition in the cloud, you can find vendors delivering high-performance, born-in-the-cloud solutions with high margins if you look closely.

Ready to make better margins in the cloud? Discover how you can deliver a powerful, migration-friendly, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering with ProfitBricks.

Pax8

ProfitBricks is offered exclusively through Pax8 in the US. Pax8 is a born-in-the cloud distributor that offers the most profitable and impressive SaaS solutions available today. The company is driving the business transition to the cloud through its comprehensive enablement and technology.